Jordan Boesch sits in a glassed-in office on the second floor of his company’s downtown Saskatoon headquarters — a funky space filled with exposed brick and Macbooks, entirely hidden from the street below — talking happily about a big deposit in the firm’s bank account.

7Shifts Inc. is celebrating the arrival of $4.5 million in venture capital funding, dollars Boesch believes are the first to flow to a local technology company from an institutional investor based in Silicon Valley. It comes just over a year after the company successfully raised $1.2 million to hire new software developers.

The investment, a significant portion of which comes from the Bay Area seed fund Tandem Capital, is expected to help the four-year-old firm — which makes an employee scheduling app used by around 4,000 restaurants worldwide — hire yet more workers and begin selling its products to larger restaurant chains.

“As you take on money, the goal is to grow a little more aggressively,” 7Shifts’ founder and chief executive said. “The fact is, between 80 and 90 per cent of restaurants still use paper, are without technology and especially if you’re a rapidly-growing quick service restaurant you’re going to be looking for solutions.”

Boesch taught himself to code and started 7Shifts in 2013 with the aim of helping his family’s Quiznos franchise. The company does not disclose its finances, but he said revenues have tripled over the last year, and that its app is used to schedule around two million restaurant worker shifts each month — up 100 per cent from six months ago.

The new capital — Boesch declined to say how much equity it bought, but noted that it is not an acquisition — will be used to hire yet more new developers and salespeople. The firm currently has more than 40 employees, and has been hiring about six per month, so it’s poised to triple in size this year, he said.

“I’m just excited to just conquer the industry, and really help restaurant operators get the tools they need to do their jobs efficiently and also empower the restaurant workers.”

While those figures are small compared to the money that changes hands in mining, oil and gas and agriculture, there’s no question the tech sector’s recent growth has been “very dramatic,” says Saskatchewan Polytechnic senior research associate Terry Peckham.

It’s growing so fast that qualified workers are increasingly hard to find.

Sask. Polytechnic’s computer science program produces about 35 graduates each year, and has a post-graduation employment rate north of 95 per cent. Anyone who completes the program — or similar programs at either of the province’s major universities — can easily find a good job at one of the dozens of startups in the province, Peckham said.

That has led a new organization representing more than 30 Saskatchewan-based technology firms to begin lobbying the provincial government and educational institutions to expand their computer science programs, which the group says are not capable of turning out as many employees as the burgeoning sector needs.

The firms that make up SaskTech — which was formed in May to advocate for the province’s tech sector — employ about 1,500 people and have spent the last several months trying to fill about 200 vacant positions, said Aaron Genest, who works for the computer chip developer Solido Design Automation Inc. and speaks for the group.

“Basically, every time we fill one, another opens up, so we could be growing as an industry much, much faster if we had access to a larger pool of employees,” Genest said.

He acknowledged that the province’s universities are struggling to do more with less — the Saskatchewan Party government’s 2017-18 budget stripped $25 million from universities, forcing them to cut costs — but said there is a strong economic argument for funding programs that guarantee jobs in an industry uncoupled from the natural resource cycle.

“The return on investment for the province in the education of these people is very, very fast. In other words, they become taxpaying citizens of the province and their taxes, the increase in the amount of money that they make, feeds directly back into the provincial coffers. The more you invest in a successful program, if the return is there, the higher your return.”

Boesch said he’s optimistic that a trickle of talented developers moving to Saskatoon from other parts of the country will turn into a flood — an expectation that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

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